Is Audio-Visual Perception ‘Amodal’ or ‘Crossmodal’?

Vision allows perception of ordinary material objects; audition, the sources of sounds. Often, perception of objects involves vision and audition—seeing and hearing the perceived things. Perception here is multi-sensory. This chapter addresses how multi-sensory perception should be understood. It distinguishes two different models for multi-sensory perception—the “cross-modal” model (different senses each represent objects in a modality-specific way), and the “amodal” model (different senses contribute to a single amodal representation of an object)—and asks which model best explains multi-sensory awareness of objects. It then examines several different kinds of auditory-visual interaction to determine whether any support the amodal model. Although many interactions can be explained by the cross-modal model, some can be explained only by the amodal model suggesting that in some instances multi-sensory perception is amodal. The chapter ends by describing some consequences this might have for understanding auditory perception and perception more generally.